For many people, eating clean means buckling down with a Paleo diet. If you're among the uninitiated, the diet consists of “caveman food” like lean meat, fish, greens, nuts, eggs, seeds and healthy oils, and ditches more processed foods like dairy, grains and legumes.

However, if you’re not totally sure what you can and cannot eat on the diet, that’s probably OK. According to new research published in the Quarterly Review of Biology, there was probably a lot more variety to ancestral diets than we think. (Too bad they didn't take tracking and monitoring as seriously as we do today, huh?)

As the study follows, the primary determining factors for the myriad of Paleo-era diets were location and seasonality. To start, hunter-gatherers in a northern climate may have eaten an exclusively animal-based diet, while those living closer to the equator might have eaten a far greater percentage of plants and veggies. In fact, older studies pointed to the diets of bears and pigs (feel humble yet?) as a modern-day approximation of a caveman diet: "[They] have an omnivorous, eclectic feeding strategy that varies greatly based on local conditions," says Dr. Ken Sayers, a postdoctoral researcher at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University.

"There's very little evidence that any early hominids had very specialized diets, or there were specific food categories that seemed particularly important, with only a few possible exceptions," he says. Furthermore, food was different way back when. The super-sweet berries in your grocery store are a pretty far cry from the the bitter berries of yore.

The experts offer up a reminder that early humans had significantly shorter life spans—and certainly were more focused on survival than eating a balanced diet. Says Sayers: "Everyone would agree that ancestral diets didn't include Twinkies, but I'm sure our ancestors would have eaten them if they grew on trees."